


The Truth In The Lie

by WhiteFoxKitsune (ProwlingThunder)



Series: The Everlasting List of Shenanigans [118]
Category: Invasion America
Genre: Cultures Against Clones, Gen, Implied Character Death, Not a Canon Character in Sight, Self-Searching, Soldiers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-08
Updated: 2014-10-08
Packaged: 2018-02-20 10:58:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,343
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2426264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProwlingThunder/pseuds/WhiteFoxKitsune
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prompt!Fill.</p><p>He's not the original. And he's not the last one like himself, either.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Truth In The Lie

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ZpanSven](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ZpanSven/gifts).



> Prompt: Rafe, Forbidden

He wasn't supposed to be here. Wasn't supposed to know about this place, or what it housed, or where it was. It wasn't supposed to exist. And there were... rules, laws, against all of it. But he'd learned a long time ago that you never let something exist if you didn't want people to know about it, and even though it didn't officially exist, he'd been able to find things nobody wanted found ever since his deployment to Barkoz, back when it had still been called Barkoz.

That had been a different life. A different person. Not him. He didn't exist back then-- wasn't supposed to exist now. But Barkoz was Ress 9, now. And he was here.

There weren't supposed to be any R&D bases on Ress 9. It was almost strictly an agricultural planet with one central city that Tyrusians had pretty much made vanish off the face of the planet decades ago. Maybe a couple of those buildings still existed, but he doubted it. Usually aerial bombardment didn't often leave too much standing. And most of the stuff they grew here was edible to the natives, but Tyrusians were allergic to it more often then not. He'd been.

The base was virtually indistinguishable from the mountain they'd built it in. If he hadn't known where he was going, he would have missed it. But finding it and getting inside were hardly the hard parts of this little jaunt.

The hard part started after he found the lab room. When he had stepped inside coded doors using a keycard he'd swiped from... someone who wouldn't be waking up ever again, but breaking his neck had felt so satisfyingly savage that he couldn't feel the least bit bad about it.

But what he'd learned... well, it hadn't felt real until he touched his fingertips against that glass tank.

It looked like an Imperial Bacta-tank. A little. Though a little bigger, and coated in a layer of frost from the inside, the liquid clear but with deep blue and embryonic red and flickering with florescent radioactive green, somehow, all entirely distinct, like crystals or plankton floating in the water. It was probably thick slush, he figured, judging by how thick it looked and how cool the tank felt on the outside of his suit. It obscured and distorted the edges and the sharpness of himself in the reflection, just enough, and it blurred the other.

His other. His clone.

No. No.

The other clone.

The first feeling was revulsion, and it seethed and coiled like an angry snake in his breast for some time, and it was a stupid, ridiculous feeling, given what he knew. But it was there, nevertheless; he'd felt it when he'd first learned the truth, too. Not so much a feeling of betrayal-- you couldn't be betrayed by someone if you didn't trust them in the first place-- but the instinctive feeling that some line had been crossed, that something unnatural had been made and twisted into a shape of familiarity and kindred.

Cloning was wrong. Was a violation of fundamentals. Nearly evil.

He couldn't think of it like that anymore.

But the plan had made sense until he'd gotten to the junction that had been able to actually bring him out to Ress 9, and he'd learned that not only was he not the original-- which he had already known, but had never had flaunted so bluntly before him-- but that the original had, in fact, been standing next to the Dragit for a while now.

The cowardly no good disgrace of a--

Even still. It hadn't changed, then, the plan. Kill the other clone had sounded like a pretty sound idea. His Command didn't need to know there was another, and they were all on Ress 9 for R&R anyway-- which he had earned them and made happen so he could further his own agenda anyway, because it's not like he could move the R&D base to a spot he could get to it without leaving an actual post, and there were a lot of pretty women here, and an alcohol that could be tolerated, and a beautiful night sky, and a local festival that he had warned his Command against, but if some of them ended up married this weekend it really couldn't be helped and he'd hammer that out as necessary, either to make it kosher with parents or to annul it or whatever was needed because they were his Command, like a mess of little children that needed supervision but all needed sometimes to go have fun without their father watching over their shoulders anyway.

Looking at himself sleeping in the tank like-- 

\--a calico cat in a laundry basket in the corner, between two walls and his toolbox, curled around five little kittens no longer then his fingers, all asleep, the first time the monster hasn't attacked him--

\--a hunk of hardened chemicals in a flash-bomb. He frowned; it wasn't the first time a memory had interrupted him. It probably wouldn't be the last. But it was a little distracting. Already he'd sworn he'd seen the girl from his memories a few dozen times just in the last few months.

Her name was Amy, and how he'd known that when he'd barely remembered how to hack a computer was beyond him, but oh how he missed her. It was horribly frustrating sometimes; no matter how many memories he didn't have, he remembered her. Well, in fact. So much so that he dreamed of her, and there had never been enough cold water back on base for him to cool down. But the showers was one of the few places he could get privacy, and he took advantage of it to wish, desperately, that he hadn't been dreaming.

Could clones fall in love? 

The body inside the tank shifted, drawing his attention back to it. Stretched out a bit, twisting his spine in a way that shouldn't have been possible. It made him frown deeper, and the writhing, coiling monster in his belly settled a bit. It wasn't about the other being a clone, or even him being a clone. He couldn't think that way anymore.

But that they had him up like this... that wasn't right. The bones were still soft, strong enough to support him, he was sure, but still soft enough to bow or bend with steady pressure. The cold was probably due to cryogenics-- something to keep him unconscious, to keep him at a steady age. An umbilical cord ran to the bottom of the tank, somehow connected; he wasn't going to even pretend to know how it worked. He didn't really want to learn. He didn't. He wasn't a scientist. But as long as it worked, that was fine.

He'd have to cut it with the glass, he figured. But...

It felt odd, to kill him now. To look in the multicolored liquid, and see his own face looking back at him, and to know he'd been exactly like that before. Could he kill himself? Commit suicide?

No. No, he didn't think he could. He'd have to let him out, take him with him. To his Command.

Oh, that was going to be awkward.

He'd have to figure that out on the way back to them, try to figure out how to smooth it. His parents had never been to Barkoz, and even if they had of, his father wouldn't have ever left a child behind. Long lost siblings wasn't an option, then.

But there were things to do, first; the glass probably wasn't going to break easily, and the last thing he wanted was for the other to break his neck on the way down.

But if he wasn't supposed to be here, and he wasn't supposed to exist, no one was going to complain to him for hacking the computers. He would get the scientists to do all the important work for him. And then he'd make sure they never told anyone about it.


End file.
